Film manufacturing operations commonly use specialized containers for storing and transporting films and related intermediary components for a given end product. These containers are especially useful for protecting high-grade films from the outside environment during shipment or perhaps to assist in organizing and/or dispensing their contents. In the case of optical films, for example, product is generally manufactured using a continuous roll-by-roll process, cut into individual sheets, and then manually stacked into a tray. This tray could then be transported to another location in the manufacturing facility for transport, storage, and eventually conversion (e.g. further processing and/or assembly).
For certain applications, protection of these films is paramount. To avoid contamination and prevent adjacent films in the stack from sticking to one another, it is common to line both sides of each sheet with a “pre-mask” film. The pre-mask film protects the underlying optical film from being scuffed and scratched from the adjacent layers of film sliding against each other. Notably, this relative sliding motion can occur at any time, including while stacking, transporting, or even during storage of these films. At some point, the optical films are converted, at which time the films are individually removed from the stack, the pre-mask layers peeled off, and the pristine film manually placed into the next converting process. Therefore, the pre-mask film not only incurs materials costs, but also extra labor, lost time, and the nuisance of their disposal.
As manufacturing operations have become more automated, however, it has been possible to reduce human involvement. For example, robotics can be used to pick and place films from a container into a converting process. Another example is a laser conversion process in which a computer-controlled laser beam cuts one or more film samples into pre-defined shapes prior to assembly. Automation has the potential to significantly improve the precision and reliability of a process, while lowering overall costs.